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"Dishy dirt on the "financialization" of American life and the hordes of
carrion-pickers who swarm us in the hope of lifting still more dollars
from our pockets. By Forbes.com blogger and former Los Angeles Times
writer Olen's account, this financialization was a bit haphazard and not
entirely well-planned-out. The IRA, for example, was intended as a
supplement to other retirement measures, whereas "what we today think of
as the natural retirement planning landscape started as an accident, a
1978 shift in the tax code designed to clarify a few highly technical
points about profit-sharing plans offered by many corporations to
high-ranking employees." Lest it make you feel cuddly to think that your
retirement account has its source in something meant for the rich and
powerful, Olen observes that it's a mook's game these days: Whereas in
the 1950s, only 5 percent of Americans were in the stock market, by
2000, that had gone up to fully half, with a vast industry peeling off
dollars in the form of management fees, commissions and so forth. The
stock market and its ancillaries received promotion as "a way to gain
wealth we could not gain through conventional savings or earnings
strategies." Unconventional means risky, as a generation of shorn
investors has recently come to appreciate, but that risk doesn't stop us
from wanting to try our luck again--and that brings in a bunch of
Olen's bugaboos, including the "wealth creation seminar business" and
people like Suze Orman, "whose riches came from...lecturing the rest of
us on our inability to manage our funds." A nice takedown, particularly
in its acknowledgement that the deck is always stacked against
"participants in a vast experiment" of the deregulated
marketplace--namely, the little guys." (Kirkus Reviews)
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